Society's Burden
by Auroran Flash
Summary: Iiii.... have no real idea. It's just the beginning of a three part MMX fic that I don't know if I'll even get to finish. X's perspective, then Zero's.. and in the third, the two meet up.


It's amusing, you know. At least I think so.  
  
These streets are black. It's lucky for the city that they are, so the memories of what happened here can all blend into the past just as the scarlet seeps into the dark asphalt and fades off into the minds of those all too eager to forget. My footsteps hardly make a sound, even clad in my heavy battle armour. The material these roads are made of now, cheaper and stronger than cement, emit no smell at all. When the days were hot, boiling like the brim of the afternoon I'm in now, you used to be able to smell the asphalt cooking in the summer sun. No longer. These new scentless roads are assumed to be an 'advanced trait'. It seems the humans have done all they can to make it so the roads we walk on now leave absolutely no marking of history.  
  
Are humans so eager to disregard the past? Must they try so hard to bury their mistakes - so hard that not even the roads tell the tale which even the most resilient of men are scarred from?  
  
Whomever it was that stated 'Humanity is resilient', may he roll in his grave. That statement gives them too much honour, too much credit. The only consistent behaviour they have is the grotesque ability to refuse to learn from their mistakes. If ignorance is bliss, it is only by the jaded hearts that walk the earth today that we aren't the happiest we have ever been.  
  
People tell me I've changed. Thank God, if there is one. Those that trained me said they watched me grow from a shaky fledgling to a warrior with the strength of an archangel. Those that knew me best told me they had watched me fight, and saw the genesis of a child all too quickly becoming a man. I thanked them for worrying about me and I disregarded their comments... after all, this war was not something I had a say in. The Powers That Be had decided for me, long before I was created, that I would be the so-called 'Phoenix of the New Age'.   
  
The Powers made a mistake. I had to rectify it - I *would* rectify it, if it took all the days and the last breath of my life. I swore this promise the first time I was called to duty, the first time I set foot on the battlefield, and again, the first time I held a dying soldier in my arms and listened as his desperate last thoughts grappled for the meaning of his destruction. In the end, he died with his blank eyes focused on me.   
  
My innocence and naivete died with that man. I knew that a misery of gigantic proportions was bearing down on my shoulders - not even ending my own life could have righted the wrong. There were too many and there was no way for me to stop them all before tremendous damage was done.  
  
For weeks after that, I cried. It pains me to remember now, but the tears came so easily. Perhaps my innocence wasn't dead yet, for I had so much will to cry at that time. When I try to summon the tears now, nothing comes.  
  
I'm dry.  
  
I tried so hard, yet I couldn't stop the hellfire from spreading with its malicious fervor throughout the continent, then the world. The fact that I was the source of all this was slowly eating me up inside, but I never paid any heed to my own emotions until the fight was done, the dust cleared, the survivors tended to and the dead carted away.   
  
So I wonder, why are you punishing me still? Why, after all I've given to you, Earth? My hands aren't bloody enough for you? Answer me.  
  
I've asked that too many times. I must be numb now. I used to scream, demanding an answer from whomever was listening. No answer ever came, now my voice has fallen to a silent plea.   
  
And they tell me that I have the power of angels. Heh. If they could see me now. They can't, of course. I couldn't save them either. My friends, anything close to a family I've had in this existence since stepping forth from that chamber, they've all slipped through my fingertips.  
  
Answer me - ... Why?  
  
I can't even brag about having lost my naivete on the battlefield, much less innocence. I still stare up at the sky waiting for its answer to my nagging questions. Today, this ends. The skies are tired of listening to my rants.  
  
Those walking this earth have felt indirect yet monumental pain at my hands. I am the cause of all Reploids, I was the fall of all Reploids. My seed, both light and dark, replenishing and invenomating. They say no pain is like the pain one inflicts on oneself.   
  
It's time I felt what this world has been feeling as it trembles in the aftermath of the raze. 


End file.
